This morning I found an email from Evernote in my inbox, stating that in the coming weeks the use of Evernote Basic will be restricted to two devices (one computer and one cellphone, two computers or one cellphone and one tablet, but I think you get the point). You need to upgrade to “plus”, “premium”, or “business” plans in order to continue to sync your notes across multiple devices.

The thing is I don’t want to spend big bucks on just sharing a few notes and collected infos across multiple devices. And all the great things included in the “plus” or “premium” plans are pretty useless for me. And even the cheapest plan (34,99 USD per year) offers just the additional functionality of saving emails to notes and using offline notebooks on mobile devices in addition to multi device sync.

In order to have an idea repository synced across all my devices (two smart phones, two tablets and two laptops) notekeeping functionality with the ability to add fotos, clips from websites and organize tasks with a monthly upload capacity of 1 gigabyte (of which I use a fraction) I have used Evernote quite intensly since 2013 for free. I understand companies want to earn $$$$ but Evernote, please be serious. Charge pros that need all you gimmick functionality (e.g. business card scanning) with the big bucks, but if you don’t allow basic customers (who by the way also constantly have to live with the advertisements you put in your app / web site) to do some syncing across more than two devices you don’t understand todays mobile community and your customer base.

It took me not even twenty minutes to install Microsoft OneNote on all my devices (I was using it on my office machine already), import my notes from Evernote into OneNote and have them synced to all my devices. Same functionality as before, for free as it used to be, just a different provider. Case closed, customer (advertisement subject) lost. I have already deleted my Evernote account, plus have sent them an email explaining why.

And by the way OneNote provides all the super premium contents Evernotes charges for for free (including unlimited monthly uploads, offline access on mobile devices, email saving into notes and digitalization of business cards). Thanks Microsoft.

After this rant (and I was really mad this morning) maybe some explanation how I integrate Evernote (until yesterday) / Microsoft OneNote (from today) into my blogging. I know that also WordPress offers the functionality for notekeeping for future blogposts. The thing is I do a lot of note keeping in other areas of my life, be it for my day job or for private things. I love the ability to quickly copy down some thoughts when they cross my mind, organize them later, enrich them with clippings from the web, links, photos I take with my iPhone or iPad, write whole blogposts, update diaries and have all of those things synced across my devices, so regardless which one I pick up I have my content available.

So my posts usually are created in my note taking app (now OneNote), then copied over to WordPress where I add the images. Works best for me.